IF I was VMware CEO, ……

Don’t get me wrong. I am happy with the current VMware CEO as well the VMware team as over all. My post is more of a message to the VMware Team & specially the CEO. I believe this below tip can help VMware crush the competition, though they have to study it carefully as it require a brave decision.

Since VMware started & it has been successfully gliding of the nice waves. It has always lead the competition by the quality of its product, as well the essential feature that no one else had. Although no one else had succeeded on over come the reliability & performance of VMware yet, many of the essential features has been replicated in many other Virtualization products in the market. Nonetheless VMware has always been able to innovate new features that customers will desire, customers started thinking that they could wait a year more and get this feature in a cheaper product, which has enough features for their current setup. Yes, I will spell it out many are looking at Hyper-v in this manner.

I have been meeting with many customers who are not ready to look over the initial cost of both VMware vSphere & Hyper-V. I agree ROI might be better with VMware, but not all customers are ready to look that far. Unfortunately at the moment the cheapest version of VMware which includes VMotion is advanced, which is a bit expensive when compared with the initial cost of Hyper-V. A lot of customers look at Hyper-V to have their basic virtualization requirements at a lower initial cost than VMware. The problem with the previous statement is these customers are comparing Hyper-V with at least VMware Advanced edition. Although VMware advanced has many more features than Hyper-V its the version customers get to compare with Hyper-V R2 due to the fact “it is the lowest version of VMware which include Live Migration or VMotion”. That get the comparison to be a cost disadvantage for VMware at the price conscious customers specially with the current economic.

I don’t see why VMware should not move VMotion to the standard edition. Common VMware marketing team you have to look around you, both Citrix & Hyper-V include Live Migration at what they love to call free. Is not it the time to revenge and include VMotion in the standard edition. If VMotion move to the standard edition, VMware will be able to compete with Hyper-V even on the initial cost. As everyone know Hyper-V charge on their management software around $1,400 for every server you manage with it. VMware standard edition can greatly compete with this price specially on the large enterprise. The only killing point to the standard edition at the moment that it does not include VMotion. I hope my message here get to some one in VMware who will help VMware standard edition to be the entry points for VMware to price conscious customers. Price conscious customers are no longer just small customers, but even large enterprises under the current economic.

I believe including VMotion in VMware Standard edition will allow VMware to crush many of their virtualization competitors at their pricing game. I hope my message reach the right channel in VMware, and If they disagree with my message I would love to hear their comments.

I am sorry if I was not clear what is the $1400 is for. For me VMware vCenter 4 is way superior to MS VMM, & it must at least be compared to “System Center Server Management Suite Datacenter (SMSD)” which has a list price of $1488** per 2 processors on:

[…] If you have been reading my blog enough, you would have noticed my post less than a year back IF I was VMware CEO. In that post, I have mentioned that If I were VMware CEO I would included VMotion in the standard […]

About The Author

Eiad Al-Aqqad is a Consulting Architect within VMware Professional Services Software Defined Data Center practice. He is VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX#89). He helps VMware Enterprise customers with their Datacenter transformation efforts being Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Software Defined Datacenter, Infrastructure As A Service, or IT As a Service. I have developed strategic designs for few of the most complex environments around where I got to execute on these designs or help the customer execute upon it.